Comic Art Friday: The Mystery of the Suspicious Surnames

I didn’t decide to attend this year’s Silicon Valley Comic Con until the week before the event. Having kept an eye on the show’s website for guest announcements, I didn’t see much opportunity to acquire new art commissions. But when artists Ryan Sook and Matt Haley were added to the guest list shortly before the show, I decided to bite the bullet and go, just to get pieces from those two talents.

As it turned out, Ryan took ill on the second day of the show, and didn’t get around to the piece he and I discussed on Friday. (It’s a fun Common Elements concept that I hope to revisit with Ryan at a future con.) But Matt — an entertaining guy I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and chatting with — completed his assignment in the waning hours of the show: this pairing of Jessica Drew, the original Spider-Woman (there have been three others introduced since Jessica made her debut in 1977), and the modern-era Black Cat, Felicia Hardy.

I’ve long wanted to match these two characters in a Common Elements scenario because of their surnames, which reminded me of those classic detectives of juvenile literature, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. I had always supposed that the names were purely coincidental, but a random conversation at SVCC revealed that they are not.

As Matt Haley was finishing up this artwork, I stopped by the table of longtime comics writer and editor Barbara Kesel, another guest at SVCC. I wanted to show Barbara my recent Stephen Foster-themed Common Elements by Carlos Rafael, which features Ultragirl, a character Barbara co-created. Barbara was intrigued by the Common Elements theme and asked what other pieces I had in the works. I explained the pairing that Matt Haley was working on just a few tables down the row, with its related-surname connection.

At that point, Marv Wolfman, the veteran comics scribe who’s written everything from Tomb of Dracula to Crisis on Infinite Earths — and who happened to be sitting at the table next to Barbara’s — chimed in: “I named both of those characters, and that’s the reason why I gave them those names.”

Which makes this, I suppose, a particularly historic Common Elements.

Speaking of history, when it comes to comics characters named Black Cat, I’ve always had a fondness for the original. Artist Steven E. Gordon had this appealing pencil drawing of the Golden Age Black Cat, Linda Turner, in his for-sale portfolio at SVCC. She somehow managed to follow me home. Cats will do that if you’re not careful.